From Powells.com

Staff Pick

I knew I loved this book by the end of the first chapter. Dark magical realism, narrated from the otherworldly perspective of a chorus of minor gods trapped in the mind of a young woman. It's not going to be for everyone, but I thought it was phenomenal. Recommended By Hayley H., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

An extraordinary debut novel exploring the metaphysics of identity and mental health, centering on a young Nigerian woman as she struggles to reconcile the proliferation of multiple selves within her

A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
One of the most anticipated and best reviewed novels of 2018, Freshwater is the remarkable debut of an astonishing young writer.

Ada has always been unusual. As an infant in southern Nigeria, she is a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents successfully prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry, as the young Ada becomes a troubled child, prone to violent fits of anger and grief. Born “with one foot on the other side,” she begins to develop separate selves. When Ada travels to America for college, a traumatic event crystallizes the selves into something more powerful. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters — now protective, now hedonistic — move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dangerous direction. Unsettling, heart-wrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.

Review

“In Emezi’s remarkable debut novel, Freshwater, we enter the lives of our protagonist, starting in Nigeria and ending in the United States. Every page is imbued with radiant prose, and a chorus of poetic voices. With a plot as alive and urgent as it is relatable, Freshwater is also solidly its own, brims with its unique preoccupations. Never before have I read a novel like it — one that speaks to the unification and separation of bodies and souls, the powers or lack thereof of gods and humans, and the long and arduous journey to claiming our many selves, or to setting our many selves free.” Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under The Udala Trees

Review

“Akwaeke Emezi... is a literary trickster, an Afropolitan who glides between US and Nigerian cultures, mores, and faiths... The great trick of this novel is that we want not only peace for Ada, but also for the troubled spirits inhabiting, and one with, her. Reading Emezi’s unfolding integration of fictional forms and modes of thinking — spiritual, analytical, historical, cultural, clinical — you feel like you are witnessing a talented and emotionally astute writer finding her voice(s). Freshwater is a dazzling, problematic debut that promises so much more.” Rob Spillman, Guernica

Review

“Ground-shaking... It is a battle for a body and a soul, and the stakes are high.” Nadja Spiegelman, Paris Review

Review

“Ambitious and original... Befitting a story about a fractured mind, the style of the novel is unconventional. Not only does Emezi write in multiple voices, but the story also progresses in a nonlinear fashion... Brilliant.” Zyzzyva

Review

“Remarkable and daring... Poetic and disturbing... Rooting Ada’s story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness and how it manifests. It causes us to question science and reason.” Tariro Mzezewa, New York Times

Review

“A startling debut novel explores the freedom of being multiple... Igbo spirituality, Emezi radically suggests, has as much to offer as any [Western] schemas when it comes to decrypting human folly or transcendence... The book would have made grim sense through a mental-health lens; instead, it is an indigenous fairy tale... The book becomes a study in dysphoria — not precisely the distress of being misgendered but the more nebulous pain of being imprisoned in a physical form, of losing your wraith-like ability to evade categorization... There is something self-defeating about trying to trace a self that is defined by indefinability; one achievement of Emezi’s book is to make that paradox feel generously fertile.” Katy Waldman, New Yorker

Review

“A witchy, electrifying story of danger and compulsion... Freshwater recounts the ‘litany of madness’ suffered by Ada in a serpentine prose that proceeds by oblique, hypnotizing movements before it sinks its fangs into you... As striking and mysterious as the ways of the gods who narrate it . . . The latest standout in this exciting boom in the Nigerian novel.” Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Review

“The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer’s life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone... The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in [sharp and glittering] shards... Emezi’s lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace.” Susan Straight, Los Angeles Times

Review

“An extraordinarily powerful and very different kind of physical and psychological migration story.” Edwidge Danticat, New Yorker

About the Author

Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and artist based in liminal spaces. Born and raised in Nigeria, they received their MPA from New York University and was awarded a 2015 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. They won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. Their work has been published in various literary magazines, including Granta. Freshwater is their debut novel.